During the past two months, the Axle team has been hard at work polishing up the existing levels, but also working on developing new content for the game and preparing for its upcoming release!

Since we last updated:

Axle will be at the IndieCade booth at E3!

We replaced our temporary UI art with official artwork.

There is now new music in the game!

We’ve integrated the cinematics into the game and added a way for you to view them within the menu.

Facebook Scores will be added soon as a feature that enables you to post your scores and invite friends to challenge your records!

We have been polishing a festival submission build, which includes the first three stages of the game, to apply to independent game festivals and contests. With those levels now completed, we are moving into working on the final two stages.

As an added treat, we've prepared a gameplay video to show you more of Axle's world:

As always, thank you for all your support for Axle and we can’t wait to bring this little guy’s story to an Android or iPhone near you!

If you know of any festivals, conventions, or competitions you would like to see Axle at, please send us an email at support@fallstreakstudio.com to let us know where!

Hope you all had a wonderful holiday season and are having a great new year!

We on the Axle team have been hard at work getting all the content into the game. At this point our structure and tools are in place, and we have been focusing our efforts on levels and art.

Since the last update we have:

Concepted all the cutscenes for the game. Over the next few weeks we will be pushing those to a final form that can go in between our levels to tell the story of Axle. We have been holding onto this along with all our other artwork and sketches to include into the art book when we ship our final round of rewards.

On a similar note, we have shipped all of our first round of rewards (posters, coasters, tees, stickers, pins, and thank you cards). If you have not received yours yet, please let us know by sending an email to support@fallstreakstudio.com and we will make sure to work that out with you.

Our composer, Adam, has finalized his music for the Factory world and composed a new piece for the Estate. Everything is extremely catchy, we cannot wait to share it with you in the game and soundtrack!

We are two levels away to having full progression for the entire game. Which means that once we complete those last two, Axle will play like a complete game; you can start at level one and play through to the end! Pretty exciting!

Being so close to having everything in the game, we have begun to focus our efforts on finding bugs. We have not run into anything progression-breaking or game-crashing (we spent a lot of time earlier this year working those out) so from here the focus will really be on delivering a polished game to you guys!

Thank you all so much for your continued support and enthusiasm for Axle! We cannot wait to get the game to you!

As always, if you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please email us at support@fallstreakstudio.com or visit us on Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr.

First and foremost, a huge "Thank you!" to all of you that gave us your thoughts and feelings on the beta level of Axle. We cannot express how extraordinarily helpful your feedback has been and we have spent the last few months incorporating your insightful critiques, thoughts, and comments into Axle to make it the best game it can be. We were thrilled to see that there was such an astoundingly positive response to the game so far--thank you for your kind words and continued support. It is truly motivating and encouraging to hear that you are enjoying Axle!

If you still have anything you would like to share on the Axle beta, please send it our way! Every bit of feedback helps us bring you a better game! Once again, you can fill out this form, or send an email to support@fallstreakstudio.com with your thoughts on the beta!

Recently, in the land of game design we have:

Designed more levels, including a train and a power station. We're getting very close to having the first draft of all of our levels done; we only have a few more left! Once we have everything in we will go through a phase of testing and revising, but we are getting close!

Finished the store user interface. We are now working to make sure that all the cool powerups and other accessories you can buy there with your watts work in the game.

Our amazing composer, Adam, finished our music for the factory world. He's also put together a first draft for the Estate world. As usual, it is stuck in everyone's head on the Axle team!

We are just about done with our system that allows you to share scores with friends!

Rewards:We've got some fun new things on the reward front as well. By now we have received our first phase of rewards from their various manufacturers (all the items that are not game-content dependent, like the soundtrack and art book. We'll be sending those out later, don't fear!) and are preparing a packaging party this weekend to send them all to you! We've also started getting in some of the fun higher tier items together.

Here is the custom Axle fabric print that will be going into our Axle ties and bow ties.

And here is our first Axle plushie! We'll be making a few more of these guys.

Here on the Axle team we have hugged many plushies and we are happy to announce that this is probably one of the most hug-able plushies ever.

As always, if you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please email us at support@fallstreakstudio.com or visit us on Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr.

Last week we were at GDC (San Francisco's Game Developers Conference). As always it was an amazing experience and a great opportunity to say hi to old friends and meet new ones.

It was truly inspiring to see so many innovative, fun, and beautiful indie games that are in production or have been recently released. Talking to other indie mobile developers was a fantastic experience and made it clear that there are many other people going through the same things we are. GDC was a welcomed break that left us refreshed and more passionate than ever to finish Axle and show it to the world.

The current alpha Axle build that we were showing around at GDC was extremely well received by everyone that played it. It was also good to get some more solid play testing at this stage in production. Some of our system iteration has finally paid off, and one or two designs are headed back to the drawing board- because we want to make Axle as good as it can possibly be.

What's New: As for progress on Axle, we just keep rolling content out!Since you last heard from us we have:

Put together a system to create parallaxing backgrounds so that we can give our worlds some depth. We're currently in the process of painting those and assembling them.

Finished a first draft on some more levels! (You'll see this one a lot in updates, we've got quite a few levels each a part of a unique machine with different obstacles and hazards)

Made revisions moving towards a final draft on our music.

Started testing the build of our game on different mobile devices.

Finished cutscene system implementation

Finished the tutorial

Added more particle effects. Because fire, electricity, and explosions make everything cooler, and easier to see on a small phone screen.

Here is what the vfx for a checkpoint will look like. When you reach a checkpoint, Axle will push until he can get the gears turning and power up the next part of the machine. (We will be doing another art pass on the checkpoint structure itself, and the gears will turn with you, but we wanted to show off the lightning!)

Production Schedule: Making a game, especially one unique and robust as Axle, takes quite a bit of time and dedication. Unfortunately we are a bit short on the former. Our small team has to be employed full time in order to pay the rent while we finish up Axle, committing everyone to a tight schedule of nights and weekends. We've accomplished an amazing amount in that time, but it does make production take longer than if we were able to devote our full time to only this game.

While production will not be finished in April, we will be working as hard as ever to get you rewards and finish Axle as soon as possible.

We've come up with a pretty exciting schedule of when you can expect to receive content and rewards from us:

First, once we have received them from the various companies which we ordered them from, you will receive the first round of Rewards. These will include everything but the Soundtrack, Art book, Background Pack, and Beta Party.

Second, once we finish polishing one of our levels that we want to see your response to, we will share with you a section of Axle, a small beta, for you to both sample and help us test.

After that we will be moving towards the end of production on Axle. Once we have a complete soundtrack and all the art done, we will put together our background pack, soundtrack, and art book, and ship them to you.

Finally, once we feel we have a well-tested project that will work on your phones, we will ship the Android version of Axle. Digital copies of the game, watts, etc. will be given out at that time.

After the Android release we will be working on user support and moving towardsreleases for other systems like iPhones, Kindle Fire, Windows 8 phones, the Ouya, and so on. We don't have time estimates for these yet, but rest assured we will keep you updated!

We could not thank each and every one of you enough for your patience and support. All of you have been amazing so far and it has been incredibly motivating to make Axle as fun and amazing as it can be!

As we said earlier, we will continue to keep you updated with progress, rewards, and anything else we feel would be interesting or useful to you.

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please email us at axle@fallstreakstudio.com or visit us on Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr.

Hello again Backers and Friends!

In addition to designing and implementing a whole bunch of new levels, the programming and design teams have been hooking up some new features:

We now have a rough draft of our in-game store, which allows you to use the watts you either earn or buy to purchase power-ups, extra lives, and other fun items.

We have some new obstacles and hazards to dodge including electricity that bounces around gears and cogs that disintegrate as you roll across them. The visual effects for these hazards are still in the works, but we'll share some screenshots with you once we have something that looks cool.

There are now first drafts for two new pieces for our soundtrack. We also have first drafts for the sound effects for the first three worlds. And let me say, these first drafts sound amazing.

On top of all that, we have some new gear textures!

We posted this guy from the toyshop levels on our Facebook page a couple weeks ago:

And here is one of the adorably devious little spiked gears from the same world:

Now that we are in a more visual stage of our production, we will be able to share with you more frequent updates to show the new textures, levels, gameplay elements, and anything else that may be fun.

In other news, we recently sent out some backer polls to everyone receiving physical rewards so we can start ordering and preparing them. If you have not responded to your poll yet, please do! The sooner we hear your feedback, the sooner we can order rewards. If you did not get a poll, it might be because you are not receiving physical rewards. If you feel as though you should have received one however, please let us know!

If you have any additional comments or concerns about your rewards, please feel free to send us a message here on Kickstarter, or to E-mail us at axle@fallstreakstudio.com.

As always, thank you for your support, and feel free to contact us through blog comments,Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or E-Mail us at axle@fallstreakstudio.com!

Jessica has been working on the Kickstarter backer rewards. We've got some neat stuff lined up for pins, T-shirts, coasters, stickers, thank you cards, and posters! (Don't worry, the rest of the rewards are up next!)

Liz has been sketching up levels on a giant drawing pad. There are a lot of gears, and a lot of huge pieces of paper floating around our workspace right now.

David has been creating hazards and obstacles for levels. You'll now have electricity, fire, and explosions to dodge!

Bryson has been moving Axle over to Unity. We are now able to add levels to the game much faster. In addition, this move will make it all the easier for us to release Axle on other platforms once we are ready!

Alex has been polishing up our UI (or user interface) as he moves the game into Unity. He's also been taking those humongous pieces of paper covered in level designs and putting them into the game.

Adam is composing some new awesome pieces for our soundtrack. Get excited for more original electroswing!

Billy bringing all our new assets to life with fancy new sound effects.

In addition to keeping a thorough schedule so we can get Axle to you as quickly and efficiently as possible, Lauren has optimized our gear textures and geometry. Producers are awesomely efficient people.

We've got two talented programmers, a designer, an artist and a producer, but that still leaves some gaps in our project as we're applying more polish. We have found a Sound Designer, Billy Peake, and a VFX Artist, Sam, who will be collaborating with us to help give a professional touch to areas outside our expertise.

We have prepped up some test implementation, but their awesome work won't be get into the game for a while, until they wrap up some of their other projects. We are working on a musical, sound and effect style in the vein of Electro-Swing (aka Swing House), which if you haven't heard it, is pretty sweet!

In other news, we have moved all of our task tracking to a site our friend Will is making for project tracking. It has been very promising, and he has been really accommodating to our needs.